When the madness in the method acts against actors
Ahead of the premiere this week of the fourth and final season of Succession, the debate about the extreme method acting madness of star Jeremy Strong has once again brought the drastic measures taken by disciples of the acting school under the microscope.
Revelations made in a 2021 New Yorker profile of the actor, in which his dedication to the acting style pioneered in the late 1950s by stars such as Marlon Brando, James Dean and Montgomery Clift, and elevated to god-like status by the American new wave generation of the 1970s in the performances of Robert De Niro, Al Pacino and Dustin Hoffman have made many people choke in disbelief and mock him for an over-the-top attitude to his fellow cast and crew that seemed cruel, unusual and unnecessary.
Strong reportedly took his full immersion approach to playing black sheep Kendall Roy to the limit: insisting that he be isolated from the rest of the cast for the duration of the shoot to help create the sense of isolation the character felt from his family, and refusing to rehearse because he wanted “every scene to feel like I’m encountering a bear in the woods”.
Throughout the publicity tour for the new season, several of Strong’s castmates including classically trained Scottish actor Brian Cox, who plays paterfamilias Logan Roy, have been disdainful of the lengths to which Strong has gone to create the performance that he won an Emmy for in 2021.
Cox has decried Strong’s methods and the method acting practice in general as “a particularly American disease”, and if one looks at the broad history of the technique’s ascendance and legends surrounding certain actors’ fabled dedication to their roles, he’d be half-right.
Though “the method” has come to be associated with Brando, the 1970s new wave performers and their heirs, particularly three-time Oscar winner Daniel Day-Lewis (for whom Strong worked briefly as an assistant in what he described as a life-changing job)
the seeds for Hollywood’s version of the acting technique were sowed in the early 20th century by Russian theatre director Konstantin Stanislavski.
Stanislavski developed a system for actors that encouraged them to draw on their own life experiences in their performances, making use of a technique called “effective memory” which would allow them to trigger experiences and memories to make their portrayal of emotions more direct and emotionally true on stage.
Just as the taste of a madeleine in French author Marcel Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past unlocks a long repressed memory, so too could Stanislavski’s disciples use triggers to unlock repressed memories and emotions to use as tools for more authentic representation of their characters.
Stanislavski’s approach was taken up in the US by acolytes such as Lee Strasberg, Stella Adler and Sanford Meisner, who went on to develop their own versions of the method and use them to inculcate a radically new approach to the craft of acting, earning some actors accolades for their efforts.
De Niro drove a taxi cab on no sleep through the grimy night streets of 1970s New York to prepare for his role in Taxi Driver; Pacino made the cast and crew of Scent of a Woman treat him as if he were blind for the duration of the shoot and Hoffman famously stayed awake for 72 hours to present a suitably bedraggled version of his character on screen in Marathon Man — leading his exasperated, classically trained co-star Laurence Olivier to tell him: “My dear boy, why don’t you just try acting?”
In the decades since, stories of the madness of method actors have abounded and none more so than in the case of Strong’s mentor Day-Lewis.
For his role as Tomas in Phillip Kaufman’s 1988 Milan Kundera adaptation The Unbearable Lightness of Being, the actor learnt to speak Czech, even though the film was in English; for his role as cerebral palsy afflicted artist Christy Brown in 1989’s My Left Foot, Day-Lewis not only visited a clinic for cerebral palsy patients but also insisted that the crew feed him and carry him.
For his role in Scorsese’s 2002 period gangster epic The Gangs of New York the actor refused to wear a winter coat — he caught pneumonia and almost died when he refused modern medicine in line with the conditions of the time the film was set in.
He used prosthetic glass instead of contact lenses to allow him to practise tapping his knife against his eye in a party trick that scared his co-stars.
Strong has hardly gone to the lengths of his hero in his portrayals, but he has certainly, like many other actors who subscribe to method teachings, adopted an all-in approach to his performances that’s alienated him from the camaraderie shared by the rest of the Succession cast and led to resentment and ridicule.
The problem with the method is not its end results — there’s no denying the still visceral, raw emotive power of Brando’s anguished Stanley Kowalski tearing his shirt in the rain and howling for Stella in Elia Kazan’s groundbreaking 1951 adaptation of A Streetcar Named Desire.
The problems arise when actors feel the need to make a cottage industry out of revealing the extent they’ve gone to in service to the method — even if these revelations sometimes help to push awards voters to honour them for the work that’s gone into their performance more than the actual performance.
Many of them would be better served by just allowing the work to speak for itself. –